Jewelery & Watches

The new 1932 High Jewelry Collection featuring the iconic masterpiece Allure Céleste

To mark the 90th anniversary of “Bijoux de Diamants”, the first and only High Jewelry collection created by Mademoiselle Chanel in 1932, CHANEL presents “1932”. The Allure Céleste necklace, the iconic masterpiece of this High Jewelry ensemble, pays tribute to Mademoiselle’s original collection.
"Nothing could be better for forgetting the crisis than feasting one's eyes on beautiful new things, which the skills of our craftsmen and women never cease to unveil" Gabrielle Chanel

Ninety years ago, Gabrielle Chanel created "Bijoux de Diamants", the world’s first High Jewelry collection. In this sumptuous collection, she applied a fundamental principle to all her jewelry creations: giving women's bodies freedom and adorning them at the same time.

 

1932. It had been three years since life had been put on hold, when Black Thursday in 1929, pushed the world into the dark years of the Great Depression and when the exuberant growth of the 1920s had faded to vague feelings of nostalgia. These were sombre times, overshadowed by the economic slump and inflation, combined with collapsing consumer demand and soaring unemployment. It is precisely for this reason that 1932 was the ideal time to break new ground and make room for hope and renewal.

 

Without shadows there can be no light, and from the start of that year a series of dazzling events had unfolded, casting their spells over a time of crisis. Elwyn Dirats and Jacques Auxenfants launched the Hot Club de France, spreading the swinging sound of jazz onto the rest of the world. The gilded stuccos of the Opéra Garnier looked on as Un Jardin sur l'Oronte sprang to life under the direction of Philippe Gaubert. A throng of 200,000 people witnessed the long-awaited launch of the ocean liner SS Normandie. And in November, the London Diamond Corporation revealed an inspiring idea for restoring the diamond market to its former luster.

 

The London Diamond Corporation turned to a woman, a visionary accessories designer, who applied the same modern design principles to clothes. A woman with a brilliant mind, whose
costume jewelry had recently been lauded by the international press as even lovelier than the real thing. A woman of power, head of a multi-faceted empire that was growing by the day. A woman who was a friend of the arts and artists, the beating heart of her era A woman who conjured women’s fate, their bodies and their way of life, on both sides of the Atlantic. The woman they chose to breathe new life into diamonds was Gabrielle Chanel.

 

Tired of the doom and gloom, she chose the possibility of dreams and the vitality of beauty. Mademoiselle created "Bijoux de Diamants", the first High Jewelry collection in history. It boosted the Diamond Corporation’s shares within two days, transformed an entire industry, and revitalized her era.

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Invitation card for the exhibition of the High Jewelry collection "Bijoux de Diamants" created by Gabrielle Chanel in 1932. © CHANEL | Roger Schall photography of Gabrielle Chanel at the balcony of her suite at the Ritz Paris in 1937. © Collection Schall / Roger Schall
"My stars! How could anything be more becoming or more eternally modern?" Gabrielle Chanel

It is said that Mademoiselle nurtured her determined pursuit of rigor and purity from her childhood in Aubazine. The Cistercian abbey bathing in the light of the Corrèze sky would be a source of inexhaustible energy and eternal inspiration for her. For example, the sun-lit corridor paved in mosaics of the sun, crescent moons and five-point stars, which had been treaded on for centuries. You could wonder, perhaps having your feet on the ground is the best way to keep your head in between the stars?

 

While she had always counted on the semi-magical power of symbols, Gabrielle Chanel would learn to believe in signs when she met Boy Capel, which would become a love affair between two people prepared to turn life on its head and transform it into an elevated experience. A summer's night in Paris. The weather was still warm and the sky would be inky black were it not covered with shooting stars, a jet-black canvas illumined by the halo of a crescent moon. Sparkling like floating diamonds, the stars were to inspire the event that was to be the foundation for all CHANEL High Jewelry. As she gazed up at the stars shining in the great extent of the sky, Mademoiselle decided to cover women's skin and hair with showers of
meteorites, with glowing crescent moons and flaming suns. "Bijoux de Diamants", the epitome of her love for the irresistible radiance of beauty and life.

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Exhibition of the High Jewelry collection "Bijoux de Diamants" created by Gabrielle Chanel in 1932. © André Kertész/Vogue Paris
"If I have chosen diamonds, it is because they represent the greatest value in the smallest volume" Gabrielle Chanel

"Bijoux de Diamants" was an expression of a highly personal vocabulary of style and of innovative ideas, an application of the principles of Haute Couture to High Jewelry. In 1932, Mademoiselle created the very first High Jewelry collection in history. Conceived around the unities of theme, time and place, it was quite unlike anything made by the jewelers of her time.

 

Her work in jewelry does not differ from that of her couture designs. As always, she focused on the silhouette in order to create the all-important look. The diamonds' perfection was enhanced by the utmost simplicity. Unadorned, with no visible setting and in classic cuts, perfectly balanced in size to create a vision of extreme purity, of a value that was eternal, resilient to the passage of time. Or worse, to that of fashion.

 

Far more than the name suggests, "Bijoux de Diamants" was a collection that was dazzling and opulent. About fifty pieces in white and yellow diamonds set in platinum as well as yellow gold, created for everyday wear were shining with a purity of light. Among the pieces that have been identified, 22 can draw a map of the sky covered with as many comets, moons and suns. Mademoiselle also imagined 17 optical illusions reproducing the suppleness of ribbon bows, dancing fringes and airy feathers, while a further 8 pieces explored the graphic purity of spirals, circles, squares, and crosses. Important shapes that were to prove rich in inspiration and would gradually release its secrets over centuries to come. Testimonies
describe monumental brooches in the shape of the numbers 3, 5 and 7, of which no trace has yet been found. In 2012, however, a documentary shot by Pathé Gaumont was rediscovered. It was broadcasted alongside newsreels in cinemas throughout France at the time. It featured a selection of the pieces from the exhibition and was filmed in Gabrielle Chanel's private townhouse at 29 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré.

 

An unmissable glimpse into the world of a woman who clearly did nothing like anyone else and everything before anyone else. The film highlights two pieces in gold and yellow diamonds – long before the 1960s Fashion – that expressed Gabrielle Chanel’s love of the sun and its vital force. A fine gold spiral wrapped around the finger with a yellow diamond perched on top, echoing the small yellow topaz ring that was the talisman of Mademoiselle born under the blazing August sun; and a sun brooch made extraordinarily precious by a multitude of yellow diamonds.

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Press article on "Bijoux de Diamants" published in L'Officiel de la Couture et de la Mode in December 1932. © L’Officiel décembre 1932.

Because she applied the same modern principles to her jewelry as to her couture designs, Mademoiselle thought of jewelry as a new idea, establishing a new relationship between jewelry and the body. While "Bijoux de Diamants" was the first High Jewelry collection in history, it was first and foremost a collection designed with women in mind. Women with a strong place in life and the world, whose femininity was in perpetual motion, for whom Gabrielle Chanel would design pieces without clasps that never impeded the freedom of their movements.

 

In creating "Bijoux de Diamants", Mademoiselle chose freedom. The freedom of women to live as they please. To move without hindrance. To choose to wear pieces that intensify the fire of their individuality, rather than serving as mannequins for diamonds. It was up to women to choose to wear a feather with a crescent moon here, or fringes with a bow there; to mix day and night by combining the sun with comets and the moon; or to transform a necklace into a trio of bracelets, detaching the motifs to wear them as brooches. An infinity of possibilities never seen before, whose inventiveness would be showered with praise in the press. Because they could be changed and transformed, because they could be positioned freely on the body to add the finishing touch to a look, the pieces in the "Bijoux de Diamants" collection did not follow trends, but they revolutionised the industry.

"I detest clasps! I've done away with clasps! Yet my jewelry is transformable"
Gabrielle Chanel

 

 

Didier Roy photography of the original "Comète" brooch created in 1932 by Gabrielle Chanel for her "Bijoux de Diamants" collection. Platinum brooch set with 28 old mine cut diamonds for a total weight of 7.8 carats including a central diamond of 1.2 carats. © CHANEL / Didier Roy

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On November 5 – a symbolic number for Gabrielle Chanel, who always presented her Haute Couture collections on the fifth of February and August, and used it in the name of her perfume created in 1921 and her handbag in February 1955 – the private view opened in her townhouse at 29 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. There, in the eighteenth-century salons of the Hôtel Rohan-Montbazon - her home for nearly ten years - the worlds of the arts, the press and high society converged. Beneath the lofty ceilings and gilded panelling burnished like the sun, between the gigantic mirrors, crystal lamps and Coromandel screens, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, and Gloria Swanson mingled. Under the heavy velvet curtains framing the vast French windows, José-Maria and Roussy Sert, Georges Auric, and the Ballets Russes ballerina Alice Nikitina gazed out upon the gardens of the Avenue Gabriel. On the deep carpets, amid the antique sofas and armchairs, Louis Metman and Georges Duthuit, curators at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs and the Louvre, chatted with the wives of Cole Porter and Alphonse Daudet.

 

Dotted around were glass cases standing on marble pedestals and flooded with a mysterious light. Within them were wax mannequins, cleaned, made up and styled by Mademoiselle, looking as though they were about to come to life. Their throats and hands were adorned with precious stones, whose brilliance was multiplied in an infinity of cleverly placed mirrors, in which the creations could be studied from every angle. Setting her stage with a Surrealist flair, Gabrielle Chanel freed her jewelry from the traditional vitrines and sent her guests flying up into a star-spangled sky above a garden.

 

In the same year that Henri Bergson argued in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (that it was intelligence that drove the individual to the collective), Gabrielle Chanel surrounded herself with the great talents of her time for the launch of "Bijoux de Diamants". A personal Bauhaus, in which human creativity transcended the most precious of materials and brought to a High Jewelry collection that supplément d'âme, or extra-special something, that was so dear to the philosopher.

Ninety-three million stones, eight billion facets... Because a novelty is often the best catalyst
for rumors, articles in the press vied with each other daily in the extravagance of the statistics, even more intensifying the aura of mystery that surrounded the collection. And with it the
feelings of rancor.

 

Robert Bresson photograph of the "Comète"
necklace created by Gabrielle Chanel in 1932 for
her "Bijoux de Diamants" High Jewelry collection.
2 © Adagp, Paris 2022 "

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In creating today what would be the jewelry of tomorrow, Gabrielle Chanel reinterpreted Paul Iribe's proposals, rethinking them, removing the clasps, and making the pieces adjustable. A multi-talented artist, illustrator and precursor of Art Deco, Iribe was part of her life from the early 1930s and represented her on the board of CHANEL perfumes. Until his death in La Pausa in 1935, he remained an ardent champion of outstanding French craftsmanship, advocating the refinement of the human spirit as opposed to the cold efficiency of mechanization.

 

Among the most moving memories of the exhibition are some drawings by the illustrator Christian Bérard showing Mademoiselle preparing her wax mannequins. For the occasion, she also had the brilliant idea of commissioning Draeger, one of the great printers of the era, to print a sumptuous press kit of five strikingly framed black-and-white photographs of the jewelry taken by Robert Bresson, one of the future giants of French cinema. He accompanied the photographs with a signed manifesto explaining his approach. A copy of this document, handwritten by Jean Cocteau, is preserved in the archives of the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris. 

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Press article on "Bijoux de Diamants" published in L'Officiel de la Couture et de la Mode in December 1932. © L’Officiel décembre 1932.

Ninety years after the creation of the first High Jewelry collection, the CHANEL Jewelry Creation Studio has drawn inspiration from the modernity of "Bijoux de Diamants" to create a new story.

 

1932 is a voyage beyond space and time, to gaze at the circling of the planets and the movements of the stars. From the legendary original collection, Patrice Leguéreau, Director of the CHANEL Jewelry Creation Studio, has retained the celestial theme, the purity of the lines and the freedom of the body, declaring: "I wanted to return to the essence of 1932 and to harmonize the message around three symbols: the comet, the moon, and the sun. Every heavenly body shines with its own light."

 

The perfect roundness of the diamond lend the symbols a form of eternity, with rays intensifying its brilliance.

 

1932 traces a new map of the skies. With the comet, an icon of CHANEL jewelry ever since the creation of the open necklace that wrapped around the neck and opened out over the chest. Spiral volutes and shooting meteors circle in endless pursuit of the celestial bodies. The moon, which was present on just one piece in the "Bijoux de Diamants" collection, becomes an icon in its own right in the 1932 collection. The original crescent moon now rises to fullness, surrounded by a shimmering halo. And of course there is the power of the sun, with its clear and graphic radiance.

 

In revisiting the past to better project itself into the future, the CHANEL Jewelry Creation Studio invents living jewelry, in osmosis with the random rhythms of the body's movements. 77 spectacular creations, of which 12 are transformable, coiling and resting freely on the skin in an abundance of celestial bodies. Starry volutes form a supple structure to be wound effortlessly around the wrist. The heartbeat with each breath makes the sun quiver at the base of the neck. In wearing the stars as she pleases, every woman decides in her own way how to extend the course of the comets along her skin. Sapphires as blue as the night, diamonds as yellow as the sun's fire, opals as dense as a galaxy, rubies of a vibrant red, spinels glowing like dawn, tanzanites with the color of the skies: if the original collection was almost entirely pristine, an epitome of pure light, the 1932 collection gives pride and place to colored gemstones.

 

The Allure Céleste necklace, the signature piece of the collection, is a journey into the heart of light, the light that emanates from the stars and links them in the immensity of the skies. Among the round-cut diamonds, an oval sapphire of a deep and intense blue and an exceptional weight of 55.55 carats and a Type IIa DFL 8.05 carat pear-cut diamond radiate with an extraordinary brilliance. The halos on this transformable piece detach to become brooches, just as the central row of diamonds becomes a bracelet, transforming the necklace into a short version and paying homage to the pieces created in 1932 by Mademoiselle Chanel, who wanted to cover women with constellations.

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Allure Céleste necklace © CHANEL

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